Tag: Capital City

FP421 – Back on the Road

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode four hundred and twenty-one.

Flash PulpTonight we present Back on the Road

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This week’s episodes are brought to you by Get Published

 

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight we follow an aging Grizelda Henderson as she rides the Capital City public transportation system into adventure.

 

Back on the Road

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

 

Grizelda Henderson was on the Capital City 43rd, headed towards fifth street.

She was considering just how long it had been since she’d last been out of the home, but, then, where had she to go? Her preference for hard living, and her love of Middle Eastern women, had kept her from settling into a family of her own.

Now, however, her fool niece Hannah had gotten herself into a whole mess of trouble downtown, so at least she had a destination.

“Handihelper is your helpful friend!” said the Handihelper.

“Shut it,” replied its wearer.

Grizelda was a good ten years younger than most in Holly Acres, but she’d made full use of her body while she’d had it, and chronic arthritis had come to rest in her knees and shoulders. If it wasn’t for the bulky robotic skeleton that carried her, she knew it would have been impossible to mount the bus’ steps.

“Handihelper is your helpful friend!” the suit reminded her.

“Fuck off,” muttered Grizelda.

For the fiftieth time, she wished she’d had a chance to find the circuit to disable the cheery voice. The rig had been something of a miracle two-and-a-half decades earlier, when she’d first been introduced to the technology. It was, in fact, the exact same model she’d used overseas, when, instead of Auntie Grizelda, she’d simply been known as Lieutenant Henderson.

“Tenth street,’ announced the public transport’s automated driver. “We regret to inform passengers that the news feeds are reporting an ongoing hostage situation at the corner of Fifth and Maple. Please be advised that this may cause traffic issues and increased risk of bodily harm.”

Like the handihelper – or the General Motors Mark III Exoskeleton, as they’d known it back in her days of sand and oil – Grizelda considered herself a relic of a past age. Still, time had not stolen her mind, and she found some relief from her pains, and her long nights of insomnia, in field stripping and reassembling the suit.

Pulling apart arm joints, and voiding the warranty by inspecting the wiring, had provided her a greater sense of normalcy than tottering about the home’s linoleum floors in the greatly restricted hardware ever could.

“Two hours of continuous operation!” the excited technician had told the group gathered beneath the yellow Easter decorations in the cafeteria, yet she’d known the military grade batteries had been able to operate for five times that, and not at the turtle crawl at which the modified units were programmed to conduct business.

There had been an incident, near the end of her tour, in which she’d been pinned down, with three other infantry, in a mud and straw beehive house. The walls had been slowly disintegrating under continuous mounted-weapon fire, but PFC Ramos had lost everything below her right knee, and Stanwyck and Garcia had both blown their leg actuators in the panicked sprint from the sandy ditch that had been their previous shelter.

The mortars landing at their heels may also have been part of the problem.

Skinner Co. Presents Back on the Road, a Science Fiction audio storyDuring the tense standoff that followed, Grizelda learned more about jury rigging the Mark IIIs than she suspected the used car salesman of a tech would ever know – her continued existence, and the yearly birthday card from PFC Ramos, were all she needed for proof.

Now, though, few seemed to care about the slow wobbling of a women that age, and thus no one had bothered to ask after the large scarlet override – pried from a floor polisher in the depths of an unlocked maintenance closet – that she’d affixed, via duct tape, to the location above her right breast where her fruit salad of campaign ribbons had once hung.

“Handihelper is your helpful friend!” the suit repeated, and all ignored it, just as they did Grizelda herself.

The vehicle announced sixth street, and Lt. Henderson registered her intention to get off.

As she descended the stairs, she found herself chuckling. “Two hours of continuous operation? I’ll need less than ten minutes.”

Slapping the red button, she sprinted away.

 

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Intro and outro work provided by Jay Langejans of The New Fiction Writers podcast.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.

FP259 – The Murder Plague: Capital City, Part 1 of 1

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode two hundred and fifty-nine.

Flash PulpTonight we present The Murder Plague: Capital City, Part 1 of 1

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(RSS / iTunes)

 

This week’s episodes are brought to you by the Nutty Bites podcast.

 

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight, Harm Carter loses himself in a city besieged by the paranoia inducing effects of The Murder Plague.

 

The Murder Plague: Capital City, Part 1 of 1

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

 

The Murder PlaguePanic can carry your feet incredible distances, and I was deeply lost in a nameless suburb before my mine ran dry.

My backstreet marathon hadn’t given me any better idea of where I might be, but it did provide a general impression of how the contagion had rippled through the city.

It was a silent thing, back in Mass Acres. Everyone simply locked their doors and went quietly mad – not so, in Capital City, as was made evident by the junk mail, and lawn ornament wreckage, which littered the sidewalks.

For example, when my adrenaline subsided, and my paranoia retreated to a general low-level terror, I noted a consistent bit of hooliganism.

You see, the neighbourhood I was touring had unmistakably been constructed by the same company throughout – if the mirrored two-story homes hadn’t made it clear, the consistent theming along the curbside would have. Every corner was adorned with an ornate faux-Victorian lamp, and every driveway had an identical wrought-iron-styled plastic mailbox at its end. It would have been a model community, if trash-bag mountains hadn’t gathered along the grassy edges, only to be ripped into, at a later date, by stray mutts.

I didn’t think much of the first of the exploded mailboxes. After a half-hour of additional wandering, though, I began to mark an irregular pattern. The original was a solitary act of vandalism on its block, but, as I progressed, I spotted a twin, then triplets.

Now, it’s the nature of the illness to notice everything. It’s also a symptom that everything seems to be sneaking up on you with a knife behind its back, but, still, you become unusually observant.

“Hoodlums,” I thought, but, as the density of the incidents increased, and their boldness obviously grew, I couldn’t ignore the worried voice which whispered constantly in my ear.

Tire tracks had peeled away from many of the decapitated pillars, and I was convinced that those responsible were thugs; true monsters, roaming the area looking for trouble to cause, and innocently-insane pedestrians to harass.

Worse, while some doors swung wide and empty, and no yard remained manicured, I felt uncomfortably certain of the occasional curtain-twitch, but the back-to-back-to-back fences left me with little place to hide. To my embattled brain, it was walk or die.

The sporadic executions grew thicker. Eventually, I came to a series of homes, painted in soft earth tones, that had their greeney torn up by marauding tires, and every one of their poles beheaded.

Despite the evidence of rain and weather upon the scattered letters and fliers, I was sure the brutes were close – and I wasn’t wrong.

I found them around the next turn.

It’s hard to say what the motivation was – perhaps the nutter had thought the postman was attempting to deliver anthrax – but, whatever the case, the plague had driven one of the local homeowners to rig a handgun within their mailbox, and they’d done a solid job of it.

There was a behemoth of a white convertible cadillac beside the trap, which had idled till its tank emptied. The backseat was likely brimming with plastic Pepsi bottles at the beginning of the run, but the pair of corpses had been industrious, and, by the time I encountered them, there were only a few scattered on the rear floor-mats. The other components for their simple explosives had been left sitting on the dash.

The driver-side door was swept wide, and its occupant lying on the pavement, not twenty feet away. His eyes were blank, and his cheeks were hollow with advancing decay. He wore a black hooded sweatshirt, but I couldn’t make out the skateboard company’s logo through the blood. His shoulder had caught the bullet, giving him a bit of a chance to crawl away, but his partner, slumped against the windshield, wasn’t so lucky. His right eye had been vaporized and no small amount of his brain matter hung from the vehicle’s fuzzy dice.

Both looked to be about twelve.

They were joyriders, and nothing more, likely abandoned by crazed, or dead, parents. It becomes difficult, upon reflection, to begrudge anyone even the most miscreant joys, when considered against the backdrop of Hitchcock’s.

“Walk or die”, said my sick mind – so I did.

 

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm, and is released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Freesound.org credits:

Text and audio commentaries can be sent to skinner@skinner.fm, or the voicemail line at (206) 338-2792 – but be aware that it may appear in the FlashCast.

– and thanks to you, for reading. If you enjoyed the story, tell your friends.